Fine, Bloodwhetting is too OP

[Ramiee]

Whenever people talk about bloodwhetting aoe I always think; Kardia doesn't heal per attack in aoe.
Reason is obvious, cus it would make SGE op in aoe scenarios, doesn't apply to WAR I guess. Hell PLD self healing is super OP too but even that doesn't do extra healing in AOE.

[Connor]

Food for thought:

That’s fair; I mean, I’m not even suggesting like a 1:1 proportion since as you say it varies by healer/tank/gear/too much to balance properly without accidentally locking out certain jobs for one reason or another.

Still though, I feel like at the very least they could try and have it be at least somewhat reflective of the toolkits if not fully proportionate. Like, you’d expect damage output to be extremely high and fast given the amount of oGCDs there are, or for tanks to be taking huge chunks of damage at any given time considering how strong the 40% defensive buffs are on top of everything else they have (Bloodwhetting/Clemency/Veil etc). Likewise you spend like 80% (idk what the actual value is but that feels right lol) of your time in combat dealing damage, but only have 2 non-healing gcds to actually use. So while the tank is sucking up HP from enemies like it’s oxygen the healer is sat there with like 90% of their toolkit they’ll never actually need to use lol.

Anyway I’m veering off-topic but basically I think the issues around Bloodwhetting etc is more a symptom of the issues with the job/battle design and how they’re interacting than the ability itself. And I mean, I won’t claim I know ‘what they should do’. I’m not a game developer or anything like that, so the best I can do is ‘vague ideas’. But then, with how little they’ve communicated with us about these problems, vague ideas are kinda all we have lol.

[Shurrikhan]

Like, you’d expect damage output to be extremely high and fast given the amount of oGCDs there are, or for tanks to be taking huge chunks of damage at any given time considering how strong the 40% defensive buffs are on top of everything else they have (Bloodwhetting/Clemency/Veil etc).

Aye. 40% is going to be noticeable, of course, but outside of very precise tankbusters paced specifically to accommodate it, it rarely feels anywhere near necessary. A bit more going into the grinder could make tank actions feel far more potent.

Final funny tidbit:

Even when popping a 40%, the majority of a tank's mitigation is passive. At i730, a tank has 48% passive mitigation (20% from Tank Mastery, 35% from Defense).

[Alice_Rivers]

Final funny tidbit:

Even when popping a 40%, the majority of a tank's mitigation is passive. At i730, a tank has 48% passive mitigation (20% from Tank Mastery, 35% from Defense).

This whole concept is insane to me, worse is the fact that I can still watch tanks melt in dungeons if they don't bother to use their kits.

[dspguy]

In that discussion it was stated multiple times that unless people stop playing, nothing matters. So it very much looks like dpsguy's view is that dissatisfaction and feedback doesn't matter until players quit.
.

Someone gets it.

And it is dspguy, not dpsguy. I'm not that arrogant to claim a handle like that

[Shurrikhan]

Someone gets it.

And it is dspguy, not dpsguy. I'm not that arrogant to claim a handle like that

I don't think most would guess you to be a direct support professional or assume you're going for descessit sine prole either, tbf. A frat (ΔΣΠ) alum, maybe. And most other common expansions of the acronym refer to things, not people, as far as I recall. /shrug

This whole concept is insane to me, worse is the fact that I can still watch tanks melt in dungeons if they don't bother to use their kits.

Well, the damage is tuned --to the extent any hypercasual content is "tuned" at all-- around that passive tank mitigation. Which ultimately means that it's just a composition check by which to nerf to all non-tanks or tank-less parties to make it even less possible to skimp on a tank.

If you could always rotate defensives and/or stack external mit to just barely survive a tank buster as a non-tank and be healed instantly before an auto could finish you, that'd be game-breaking, after all. Tanks aren't *guffaw* healers -- mein gott.

[Supersnow845]

Inbuilt mitigation functionally enforcing a tank while casual content does nothing to enforce any other role (and high end content doesn’t even try to enforce a healer) is such a crap decision

Why are tanks so babied in this game

[Lyth]

The trinity is simply not applied.

The value that tanks and healers provide is entirely dependent on the existence of a trinity design. There are games that don't use a trinity, but in those games, everyone is a DPS.

you're supposed to heal the party not limit yourself to the WAR.

The interdependence between tanks and healers is central to how a trinity design works. In a traditional trinity design, if your tank doesn't mitigate effectively, or your healer doesn't keep your tank's HP above a critical threshold, then the tank dies and the rest of the team gets oneshot. This is why support roles were historically high value. I think FFXIV attracted a lot of skilled players to supports in ARR and Heavensward because you not only had this going on, but you also had the capability to do competitive damage through alternative gearing options and damage stances.

Over time, the game has shifted towards being a trinity design in name only. You have an undying tank that does underwhelming damage on a self-positioning boss with an understudy on standby in case they mess up, you have healers on standby hoping that they'll be paged in to fix any mistakes and tidy up any unaddressed damage, and then you have DPS doing the bulk of the high value gameplay. At this point, you might as well convert all jobs to DPS and give everyone DPS parity, so that everyone has equal value. Maybe you distribute a few raidwide defensives and heals to some more 'support-orientated' jobs, and then let the boss completely self-position. There are a number of MMOs that do this already. The only reason FFXIV doesn't do this openly is because they made a historical commitment to the trinity design approach years ago and now they can't openly change away from it. But it's in appearance only, and supports are the ones that lose out.

I think if you want to restore value to the support roles, they need to be interdependent again. That means toning back the self-sustain and mitigation inflation.

[TouchandFeel]

To me the main issues that make tanks no longer feel like as defined as a role is that power-creep was allowed to get out of hand, arguably because of a specific job which I think we can all easily identify, and that just set the tone for most of the other tanks to then not be allowed to fall too far behind. Rinse repeat that cycle over a decade and well, you see what happens. So ultimately we ended up with tanks being way too self-sufficient and too powerful defensively.
Couple that with player complaints over the years of jobs and/or content being too hard based on one-off bad experiences or players, leading to jobs and encounters being drastically simplified and you end up with jobs that basically play themselves.

Also, I feel there was a vast underestimation of the power of self-healing as a defensive tool where things like shields and % mitigation can reduce or at best nullify incoming damage but self-healing can potentially go beyond that and undo/recover damage that was done previously when the healing crosses that threshold of outpacing the rate of incoming damage. This makes it far more difficult to balance against other forms of defenses.

Healers then got screwed because with tanks being so powerful defensively, the whole point of the role basically got nullified. If your primary responsibility is to heal a specific player but that player can just keep their health up mostly by themselves, then what are you even there for?

First and foremost, to improve both tank and healer game-play, tanks need their defensive capabilities, mostly in the self-healing category, reduced.

Then for tanks, there needs to be more tank specific mechanics in fights asides from the occasional buster. More hard-hitting boss abilities targeting other players that the tank has to either pick-up or have to use their defensives they can target others with. More phases with adds or multiple bosses on the field at once. More forced tank swaps. More fights where boss positioning and/or location in the arena matters. You could have entire mechanics about the boss needing to be moved to changing parts of the arena such as something appearing in the arena that needs to be destroyed or it will explode and do a ton of damage but you can lead the boss over to and have it cast an AoE on you that if it hits the object it breaks it or does a bunch of damage to it to make breaking it way easier. Anyways, I could go on and on, but I think the point has been made.

As for healers, the part I mentioned for tanks about spreading the damage to other party members more that the tank has to help mitigate so that the party member will survive would also help the healer have more to do.

[Terhix]

Also, I feel there was a vast underestimation of the power of self-healing as a defensive tool where things like shields and % mitigation can reduce or at best nullify incoming damage but self-healing can potentially go beyond that and undo/recover damage that was done previously when the healing crosses that threshold of outpacing the rate of incoming damage. This makes it far more difficult to balance against other forms of defenses.

I think this is still true given the design of 40% mits: WAR got a total of 1500 potency hot, DRK got a 1200 potency excog, PLD got a 1000 potency shield. Roughly translates to shields being valued (or taxed, if you will) more than direct heals, which are valued more than heals over time. For tank busters this is generally true as shield can prevent you from dying where a heal will not if you were to drop to 0 without it in both scenarios, but for general attrition (be it autos in raids or damage from trash in dungeons) the overall potency is king.

Then for tanks, there needs to be more tank specific mechanics in fights asides from the occasional buster. More hard-hitting boss abilities targeting other players that the tank has to either pick-up or have to use their defensives they can other target others with. More phases with adds or multiple bosses on the field at once. More forced tank swaps. More fights where boss positioning and/or location in the arena matters. You could have entire mechanics about the boss needing to be moved to changing parts of the arena such as something appearing in the arena that needs to be destroyed or it will explode and do a ton of damage but you can lead the boss over to and have it cast an AoE on you that if it hits the object it breaks it or does a bunch of damage to it to make breaking it way easier. Anyways, I could go on and on, but I think the point has been made.

I really like the beam stack-markers that also have the tanks-in-front-or-people-might-die mechanic. If XIV stole the mechanic of autos applying a stacking debuff forcing a swap every now an then in savage, I reckon we'd also see much higher demand for general self-sustain balance across tanks, as right now it seems tanks are only balanced on two vectors: DPS and tank busters. There is also raid-wide mitigation, but given M3S exists I wouldn't say tanks are currently balanced in that aspect at all.